The ONS Released New UK Labour Stats, Here’s What They Showed

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is a UK body that publishes regular data on the economy and society, and their latest labour stats were just released.

Whilst it’s no surprise that the UK economy has been going through a turbulent time at the moment, seeing the statistics in real terms paints a real picture of what’s going on.

Here’s what the January 2026 stats showed.

Employment Is Slipping

The UK employment rate sat at 75.1% between September and November 2025. At first look, this seemed positive. 75.1% was steady from the previous quarter and slightly up from a year earlier.

However, a deeper look told a different story.

Data based on HMRC Real Time Information (RTI) payroll shows that the number of employees on payroll dropped by 155,000 over the year from November 2024 to November 2025 and by 33,000 between October and November 2025.

Early estimates for December suspected another decrease of 184,000, bringing the total workforce to 30.2 million. However, the data was still not finalised at the time the report was published.

All in all however, when looking at Real Time Information (RTI) payroll as a metric, the data has seen a decrease in 8 of the past 12 months.

Unemployment Is Up

With the above stats taken into consideration, it’s no surprise that the unemployment rate is up. In fact, unemployment rose to 5.1% between September and November 2025, which is up both on the previous quarter and the year as a whole.

In real terms, this is around 280,000 more unemployed people than in the same period in 2024.

At the same time, economic inactivity, which measures the number of people who are not in the labour force but also not technically fully unemployed, sat at 20.8%. What this shows is that people are actively looking for work, but not all of them are finding jobs.

In fact, when looking at the unemployment-to-vacancy ratio, there are now 2.5 unemployed people for every job vacancy, up from 1.9 a year ago. This means that employers have more choice and competition for each role is on the up.

Wages Are Rising Faster Than Inflation

Another finding from the report is that wages are continuing to rise faster than inflation.

Average weekly earnings grew by 4.5% for regular pay and 4.7% included bonuses in the 3 months to November 2025 showing strong growth.

Importantly, this wage growth is actually beating inflation. After adjusting for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, real term regular pay increased by 0.6%, while real total pay rose by 0.8%.

Public sector pay was also high at 7.9 although the ONS does say this is partially due to payrises happening a little earlier than they were last year.

Sector Growth Varied

When it comes to the different sectors involved, some grew whilst others faded into the background.

Health and social work added 37,000 jobs over the year, while wholesale and retail lost 72,000, the biggest drop of any industry.

Across the UK, Northern Ireland was the only part of the UK that saw payrolled employment rise over the year. London had the biggest drop, with employee numbers down 1.1% year on year, alongside an unemployment rate of 7.2%, which was the biggest in the region.

What Does This Mean?

Overall, the ONS figures paint a picture of a labour market that isn’t in full collapse, but it is definitely cooling.

Employment is down, unemployment is up and competition for jobs is on the rise, making it an employer’s market.

And when it comes to wage growth, this is on the up, however with fewer people actually in the workforce, economic activity as a whole is going down.

What This Means For Policymakers

For policymakers and government officials, the task of encouraging more businesses to employ more people, without losing wage growth is a tricky task.

And with new stats out today about UK inflation well above the base line the Bank of England are aiming for, we’ll wait and see what they do next.